President Trump on Saturday paid tribute to “beautiful” American college student Otto Warmier — who died in 2017 after being detained in North Korea — and defended his negotiations with the country after he was criticized for saying he took North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “at his word.”

“We got our great people back … and that includes our beautiful, beautiful Otto, Otto Warmbier, whose parents I’ve gotten to know, who’s incredible,” he told a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) crowd in Maryland.. “And I’m in such a horrible position because in one way I have to negotiate and the way I love Mr. and Mrs. Warmbier and I love Otto and it’s a very delicate balance.”

WARMBIER’S PARENTS PUSH BACK ON TRUMP’S COMMENTS, BLAME KIM’S ‘EVIL REGIME’ FOR SON’S DEATH

“He was a special young man and to see what happened was so bad,” he said.

Trump drew bipartisan criticism for saying during Thursday’s summit with Kim in Hanoi that he took the dictator “at his word.”

“I believe something very bad happened to him,” Trump said. “I don’t think leadership knew about it.”

Fred and Cindy Warmbier released a brief statement on Friday morning reiterating their long-held claim that the regime was indeed responsible for their son’s death:

“We have been respectful during this summit process.  Now we must speak out. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”

The 22-year-old University of Virginia student died in June 2017 after being returned home in a vegetative state. His parents have said he was tortured. The suburban Cincinnati youth was visiting North Korea with a tour group when he was detained in 2016 for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. North Korea has denied mistreating Warmbier.

NEWT GINGRICH: TRUMP AND HALEY RIGHT TO CONDEMN NORTH KOREA IN OTTO WARMBIER’S DEATH

There have been conflicting reports over whether Warmbier was tortured. But Trump himself asserted in September 2017 that Warmbier was “tortured beyond belief by North Korea.”

On Friday, Trump said he had been “misinterpreted” and said that “of course I hold North Korea responsible for Otto’s mistreatment and death.”

“Most important, Otto Warmbier will not have died in vain. Otto and his family have become a tremendous symbol of strong passion and strength, which will last for many years into the future. I love Otto and think of him often!” he tweeted.

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At CPAC, Trump said that the Hanoi summit, the second such summit with Kim, was a “good meeting,” although he ultimately had to walk away from the talks.

“We get along, we’ve developed a good relationship, very good, and made great, historic progress,” he said.

Fox News’ Judson Berger, Eric Shawn, Jason Donner and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-praises-beautiful-otto-warmbier-after-criticism-over-north-korea-comments

Many supporters at the rally, a good number of whom were students, said that they had long been fans of Mr. Sanders and that they were excited to see him run for president a second time.

“Last election, we supported Bernie,” said Isabel Saffioti, 15. “We want to come out and support him again.” Standing beside her was her sister, Carmen, 19, a student at Brooklyn College, who said she was thrilled the senator had decided to start his campaign there. “I think it would be cool if he talked more about his roots,” she said.

Chris Huth, 19, said he liked Mr. Sanders because “he’s human.” But he also said that, though he supported the policies of “leftist people” like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he had not decided yet whether he would vote for Mr. Sanders. “It’s still the beginning,” he said. “We’ll see.”

For the most part, the crowd was lively despite the chill. Before the rally, a snowman in a Bernie T-shirt became a popular photo companion. Speakers offered a playlist of songs with a theme of change: “Uprising” by Muse, “Revolution” by Flogging Molly.

But even as Mr. Sanders seemed ready to present more of himself to voters, some supporters suggested it was his unwavering commitment to policy that most endeared him to them.

“He’s been consistent since Day 1,” said Katie McCrudden, 23, who left her home in New Jersey at 7:30 a.m. to get to the rally in time. “His politics have not changed.”

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-democrats.html

Fox News host Sean Hannity is drawing fire for comments he made about Michael Cohen in an interview with President Trump on Thursday, and one lawmaker wants him called to testify in front of Congress.

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., who sits on the committee, tweeted “Sean Hannity is now volunteering himself as a witness. I look forward to his testimony” following Hannity’s comments about the president’s former longtime fixer, who spent three days testifying in front of Congress this week.

Cohen testified behind closed doors to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and publicly to the House Oversight and Reform Committee this week. He is set to testify to the House Intelligence Committee again next week. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations related to hush-money payments ahead of the 2016 election to two women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump, as well as lying to Congress.

In an interview with Trump in Vietnam, Hannity said that Cohen had told him he — not Trump — had made the decision on the payments without telling the then-candidate.

“He told me that personally,” Hannity said.

A Cicilline spokeswoman told CNN that Hannity volunteered firsthand knowledge about Cohen. “If he was lying, it wouldn’t be the first time. This is the same guy who claimed inside knowledge that Russia didn’t hack the DNC until a federal judge ordered him to stop. Regardless, if he feels he has information that’s relevant to this investigation, he should share it under oath before Congress.”

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/next-to-testify-on-hush-money-payments-sean-hannity

In retrospect, it was an important message that was obscured by the discussion of an end-of-war declaration.

What really mattered to Mr. Kim were the sanctions, which, after three new rounds in 2017, were strangling his nation’s already pitiful economy. The United States had even cut off critical humanitarian aid to the country by barring American aid groups from traveling there.

With diplomacy stalled, Mr. Trump decided to weigh in again.

Mr. Bolton announced in December that Mr. Trump wanted another summit meeting in early 2019 because North Korea had “not lived up to the commitments” it made in Singapore. To some diplomats and analysts, that seemed like a reason not to meet again.

The North Koreans appointed a former ambassador to Spain, Kim Hyok-chol, to lay the groundwork with Mr. Biegun, 55, a pragmatic former senior aide to Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration who had been passed over for the national security adviser position in favor of Mr. Bolton.

The first meetings in Pyongyang did not go smoothly. And when the two sides met in Hanoi starting six days before the summit meeting, the North Koreans kept demanding that the five most recent rounds of sanctions imposed by the United Nations since March 2016 be lifted.

Mr. Ri, the foreign minister, said later that North Korea chose those sanctions because they affected ordinary citizens.

These sanctions, imposed to punish Pyongyang for new weapons tests, differed from previous restrictions that were focused on weapons and nuclear-related equipment. Instead, they covered entire export sectors, including minerals, metals, coal, agriculture and seafood.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/world/asia/trump-kim-jong-un-summit.html

President Trump, in an expletive-laden speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Saturday, accused FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of trying to take him out with “bulls—” and accused a top Clinton aide of not having recovered “from getting his a– kicked.”

Trump accused his opponents of moving away from a narrative of Russian collusion as Mueller prepares to file his report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He said that the report was being produced “by people who weren’t elected.”

TRUMP SAYS COHEN’S NEWLY REVEALED BOOK PROPOSAL BLOWS UP TESTIMONY: ‘TOTALLY DISCREDITED!’

“Unfortunately you put the wrong people in a couple of positions and they leave people for a long time that shouldn’t be there and all of a sudden they’re trying to take you out with bulls—,” he mused to the delighted crowd in Maryland, as he mocked “the collusion delusion.”

Trump’s remarks come just days after former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified to a House committee, and appeared to partially shut down some of the claims surrounding theories about the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Moscow — including denying that he traveled to Prague in 2016, and saying he has no knowledge of any compromising material Russia may have on Trump.

President Donald Trump hugs the American flag as he arrives to speak at Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2019, in Oxon Hill, Md., Saturday, March 2, 2019.
(AP)

In his speech, Trump pointed to alleged hypocrisy from Democrats who he said wanted to fire former FBI Director James Comey, only to change tune when Trump fired him in 2017. He pointed in particular to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and former Hillary Clinton campaign Chair John Podesta.

“Podesta, I believe that day, because he still hasn’t gotten over getting his a– kicked in the election, the great genius of campaigns, he called for Comey’s resignation.”

He went on to say he told First Lady Melania Trump that the move would be popular.

“And I fire a bad cop, I fire a dirty cop and all of sudden the Democrats say ‘How dare he fire him? How dare he do this?’” he said. “That’s where we are. In this swamp of Washington D.C. but you know what? We are winning and they’re not.”

The rip into the Russia probe marked only one aspect of a lengthy speech, where he regularly went off-script to josh and joke with the audience, as well as to wax lyrical on the issues of the day, on everything from media bias (“These people are sick”) to his “Never Trump” opponents within the GOP (“They’re on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”)

He saved some of his barbs for Democratic policies like The Green New Deal — a comprehensive overhaul of America’s economy and a shift to 100 percent renewable energy.

“When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric: ‘Darling, is the wind blowing, I’d like to watch television,” he quipped.

But he jokingly encouraged them to keep on pushing the Green New Deal, apparently sensing that the policy may be unpopular and lead to Trump’s re-election.

“I like the Green New Deal, I respect it greatly, it should be part of the dialogue of the next election,” he said to laughter from the audience.

He also used anecdotes to promote his policies at home and abroad, particularly pulling back troops from the Middle East. At length he talked about how he flew it into Iraq over Christmas and was told to kill the lights on Air Force One as it came into land.

“We spent $7 trillion and we can’t land a plane with no lights on,” he said.

As Trump spoke at length, the crowd appeared to eat up everything he had to say. Ahead of the speech, audience members stood on chairs, craning their necks to get a glimpse as the Rolling Stones’ “Time Is On My Side” blared through the speakers — indicating the president’s imminent arrival.”

Fox News’ Liam Quinn contributed to this report.

Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-fires-up-cpac-with-expletive-laden-description-of-mueller-probe-theyre-trying-to-take-you-out-with-bulls

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(CNN)President Donald Trump has a perfect veto-free record so far, the result of support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and, until they lost their majority, Republicans in the US House.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/02/politics/trump-presidents-veto-congress-history-override-national-emergency/index.html

Angry arguments broke out in the West Virginia statehouse on Friday after the state Republican Party allegedly set up an anti-Muslim display in the rotunda linking the 9/11 terror attacks to a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

One staff member was physically injured during the morning’s confrontations, and another official resigned after being accused of making anti-Muslim comments.

The display featured a picture of the World Trade Center in New York City as a fireball exploded from the one of the Twin Towers, set above a picture of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim.

“‘Never forget’ – you said. . .” read a caption on the first picture. “I am the proof – you have forgotten,” read the caption under the picture of Omar, who is wearing a hijab.

Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/gop-s-anti-muslim-display-likening-rep-omar-terrorist-rocks-n978371

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Who do you want to believe? President Donald Trump, who has told more than 8,000 lies since becoming president, or his ex-attorney, the recently disbarred Michael Cohen, who has confessed to lying to Congress and is prison-bound for those fibs, as well as other charges, who now calls his former boss a “conman”? If you sided with the newly penitent former legal hitman, then you came out on the other side of seven ill-tempered hours of testimony with a modest increase in your stockpile of Russia evidence. A jamboree of “silliness,” to borrow Cohen’s word, but worth it.

Cohen had three or four advantages going into his liars’ contest with Trump as the House Oversight Committee swore him in to testify on Wednesday. First, Cohen has owned up to his lies, which is something Trump has never done. Second, he had the audacity to return to the forum where he told the original incriminating falsehoods—Congress—knowing his every statement would be assayed and scrutinized for untruth and additional prosecution. Third, he brought documents to support his assertions that his former boss had engaged in possible campaign finance violations by paying off paramour Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels), possible tax evasion, possible bank fraud, possible insurance fraud, and possible self-dealing through misuse of his foundation’s funds. Finally, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Maryland), who presided over the hearings, lent additional veracity to the testimony, noting that he had vowed to Cohen that he would go Biblical on him at the hint of any new lies.

Story Continued Below

“These were my exact words, ‘I will nail you to the cross,’” if you lie again, Cummings said.

The advantage went to the convicted liar over the unindicted liar, as Cohen supplied testimony that added new clarity to an array of previous accusations aimed at the president.

“A lot of people have asked me about whether Mr. Trump knew about the release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of time. The answer is yes,” Cohen said.

Cohen described overhearing a July 2016 speakerphone discussion between Trump and self-described political dirty trickster Roger Stone in which Stone said he had just gotten off the phone with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. According to Cohen, Stone said that Assange promised a massive dump of emails would arrive in a couple of days conveying damage to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—which they did. Stone loosened his new gag order just enough to deny the speakerphone account and WikiLeaks stated that Stone and Assange had never had a phone call. Somebody’s lying here, but who?

Cohen also conveyed his belief that Trump knew in advance of the famous June 2016 Trump Tower encounter in which a bevy of Russians trundled into Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort on the pretext that they had “dirt” on Clinton. Cohen said he witnessed Junior entering Trump senior’s office, leaning over to tell his father, “The meeting is all set,” several days before the Russian visit. Cohen said he had no evidence that Trump or his campaign had colluded with Russia, “But I have my suspicions.” The president said from the Hanoi summit that he was “a little impressed” that Cohen, while lying about everything, nevertheless thought there was no collusion. He conveniently ignored the part about his former lawyer’s lingering doubts.

Cohen also earned Junior and Ivanka Trump invitations from Cummings to testify after Cohen testified both had been briefed about 10 times on the Trump Tower Moscow project. In September 2017, Russia scandal mavens will recall, Junior told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was only “peripherally aware” of Moscow project. Ivanka Trump said in a recent interview that she knew “literally almost nothing” about the Moscow deal.

Cohen’s testimony added additional pixels to the scandal picture and provided a potential “roadmap“ for future sleuthing by Congress. “All you have to do is follow the transcript,” Cummings told reporters. “If there were names that were mentioned, or records that were mentioned during the hearing, we want to take a look at all of that.” Junior and Ivanka, as well as Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, whose name came up 30 times in testimony, are now imagining the day when they too will endure the committee’s alternating comfort and condemnation. Meanwhile, the chair of the Ways and Means Committee has now instructed his attorneys to request several years of Trump’s tax returns. The House Intelligence Committee interviewed Cohen for seven hours in closed-door hearings Thursday, and he will be back for more next week. Former Trump associate Felix Sater, also mentioned in this week’s hearings, will testify before the intelligence committee on March 14. That one will be in public, which is sort of like offering an open bar at the prom – it just ends up with a lot of nicely dressed people talking loudly and behaving badly.

Most of the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee burned their time with filibusters that sought to impeach Cohen’s credibility, but they failed to make the convicted liar sound like anything but an honest witness. Meanwhile, some Democrats, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., wanted to break news. Twice Krishnamoorthi swung his pick-ax in hopes of busting loose a nugget, asking Cohen about his last communications with Trump and whether Trump had engaged in other criminal wrongdoing. Cohen answered “Yes” to that second question before slipping the knot. He said he had been asked by Southern District of New York prosecutors—the lawyers who squeezed him for his guilty pleas—“not to discuss and not to talk about these issues.”

Intimations that the SDNY is still on the case traps the president on three sides—congressional hearings, federal prosecutors and the special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s office (remember him?!). As these three forces work their way down the evidentiary chain, applying pressure on Trump’s family members and sifting through his financial records, how will the liar-in-chief react? If it’s true that Trump has never met a crisis he couldn’t lie his way past, prepare yourself for a festival of fudging, stonewalling and prevarication that will pale his previous outbursts.

And that ain’t no lie.

******

Send creative lies to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee and my Twitter feed by the House Oversight Committee. My RSS feed has this word for the Southern District of New York: “Top of the world, Ma!”

Source Article from https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/02/cohen-russia-scandal-225516

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(CNN)President Donald Trump has a perfect veto-free record so far, the result of support from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and, until they lost their majority, Republicans in the US House.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/02/politics/trump-presidents-veto-congress-history-override-national-emergency/index.html

Every turn of every investigation into Russia and the 2016 election has hit a dead end, and likewise, no one should expect a thrill ride when special counsel Robert Mueller finally turns in his report.

A new Time article by former prosecutor Renato Mariotti readies liberals and other critics of President Trump for that ultimately disappointing outcome to the yearslong special counsel investigation. True, that’s the likely end facing Trump’s opponents, but Mariotti is 100 percent wrong in arguing that it will be because of a “successful disinformation crusade” by Trump.

Mariotti wrote that Trump “worked to raise a nearly impossible and definitely illogical bar for Mueller to clear: proving ‘collusion’ and charging a grand criminal conspiracy involving the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”

No, no, no, no, no. Any raising of expectations for the special counsel was done exclusively by the Democratic Party and the national news media, both of which in 2017 demanded the creation of a special counsel with limitless legal authority to find the golden egg, proof that Trump’s campaign had worked in coordination with Russia to tip the election in his favor.

Yes, that demand came after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who was probing former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s clandestine conversations with Russian officials. But it’s well worth a reminder that firing Comey was also something Democrats and liberals in the media wanted.

The hardest evidence that anything happened with Russia in the 2016 election are indictments of some Russians for “fraud and deceit.” The product of their mass conspiracy was a bunch of tweets and Facebook posts spread on the Internet with the intention of getting people angry about politics. In essence, Russians looked at what was already on America’s Facebook and Twitter and repeated it.

What an ingenious plan to snatch the election from Hillary Clinton!

The grand social media scheme wasn’t a heist. It was a mirror.

After Facebook took measures in 2017 to fight any “fake” political posts on the platform, one liberal organizer told the Washington Post: “Russians might have been there, but Russians are not creating and invoking these feelings. These are real feelings, not Internet-created feelings.”

The FBI, the House, the Senate, and the entire national news media have been investigating Russia and any ties to Trump since 2016. Here are some of their findings:

  • Michael Flynn contacted Russian officials during the presidential transition and asked that they not escalate tensions with the U.S. over sanctions enacted by the Obama administration. There was no crime here until Flynn lied to the FBI about it.
  • Well, into the 2016 election, it appears Trump was pursuing a business deal in Russia to construct a Trump Tower Moscow, a project he has reportedly fantasized about since the 1980s. There is no crime here.
  • Paul Manafort, who for a period served as one of Trump’s campaign managers, reportedly showed internal polling campaign data to a Russian, a crucial bit of information, no doubt, in Russia’s tweet strategy. There is no crime here.

The purpose of the Time article is to sink expectations lower than they already were, as every “revelation” of the never-ending Russia nightmare has failed to lead us to the holy grail.

There’s a lot of wreckage as a result of Mueller’s rampage into the past professional lives of Trump associates. That alone kneecapped Trump’s presidency, compromising any goodwill he might have had with congressional Democrats and depressing his political capital with the public.

Democrats almost certainly won’t get the final kill shot from Mueller’s report. But that’s not Trump’s fault. It’s theirs.

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/if-robert-muellers-report-disappoints-its-because-everything-on-russia-has-been-a-disappointment

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(CNN)It’s been a week for Donald Trump.

Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/01/politics/donald-trump-bad-week-in-review/index.html

What moral sacrifices should the U.S. be willing to make to secure North Korea’s effective denuclearization?

I ask that question in light of the uproar that has followed President Trump’s equivocation over Otto Warmbier. An American student who was imprisoned in North Korea, Warmbier died shortly after his return to the U.S. in 2017. But where Trump previously condemned Warmbier’s demise as evidence of Kim Jong Un’s barbarous regime, on Thursday the president changed tack. Referring to a discussion with Kim about what happened to Warmbier, Trump said, “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.”

I get why that comment greatly upsets some people. As my colleague Becket Adams notes, “Considering the Kim regime maintains an iron grip on all information that comes in and out of North Korea, and the fact that he has a murderous special police who are tasked specifically with keeping him informed of all goings on in the country, Trump’s suggestion that the North Korean despot wasn’t aware of what was happening to Warmbier beggars belief.”

He’s right. Kim Jong Un would have known what happened to Warmbier and would have been able to ensure his better treatment. Trump knows that Kim Jong Un would have known. Yet, while Trump’s words were poorly chosen, I have sympathy for his broader point that just about anything that can bring about North Korea’s denuclearization is worth doing.

The question is, where does the line lay? What sacrifice is too much?

That’s what we have to debate. Some, such as CNN’s Chris Cillizza, appears to believe Warmbier’s new treatment by Trump is too much. He asserts that the “question that has to be asked is, at what cost? How much of our moral principles and standing in the world are we willing to sacrifice to appease a dictator with a horrendous human rights record?”

It’s a legitimate question.

But if the benefit is a denuclearization deal, then the question must be judged against the counterpoint. The counterpoint here is a prospective war with North Korea.

That makes me accept Trump’s words. Because I do not want to see young Americans fight another bloody battle in defense of South Korea, not unless that battle is absolutely necessary. It’s a moral choice. My moral judgment is that such a war would be more “horrendous” than the “horrendous human rights record” of Kim Jong Un.

The history of the last Korean War suggests as much. In his history of the November-December 1950 Battle of Chosin Resevoir, On Desperate Ground, Hampton Sides records the brutal cold that the Marines suffered. “The cold seemed to come with only one upside: it had a cauterizing effect on wounds. Blood from bullet holes or shrapnel tears simply froze to the skin and simply froze to the skin and stopped flowing.”

I do not wish to see this suffering replicated in 2019 or another year yet to come. To prevent it, I am willing to stomach Kim Jong Un’s continued evisceration of his people. Yes, even his murderous brutality towards a young American.

As these negotiations go forward, we should always keep Otto Warmbier and the suffering North Korean people in our memory. But we must also remember Americans like Jesse Brown who died at Chosin in 1950.

The moral choices between war and peace may be clear, but they’re rarely simple.

[Related: Trump claim that Kim Jong Un ‘didn’t know’ about Otto Warmbier at odds with court testimony]

Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/otto-warmbier-trump-and-the-moral-price-of-peace

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(CNN)The chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued a stark warning Friday to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, demanding that the White House turn over documents and comply with interviews related to how the White House handled security clearances of some of the President’s closest advisers.

    Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/01/politics/congress-investigate-security-clearances/index.html

    WASHINGTON — The top tax-writing committee in the House is readying a request for years of President Donald Trump’s personal tax returns that is expected to land at the Internal Revenue Service as early as the next few weeks, according to congressional aides involved in the process. And Democrats are prepared to “take all necessary steps,” including litigation, in order to obtain them.

    Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., has asked the committee’s attorneys to prepare the request, according to two aides involved in the process. Neal has also contacted the chairs of several other House investigative committees, including Oversight and Government Reform, Financial Services, Intelligence and Judiciary, asking them to provide detailed arguments for why they need the president’s tax returns to conduct their probes.

    “Every day the American people and Congress learn more about President Trump’s improprieties, from conflicts of interest to influence peddling, potential tax evasion and violations of the Constitution — all roads leading back to President Trump’s finances,” said Ashley Etienne, spokeswoman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

    “These improprieties, and the lack of transparency around them, give the House legitimate legislative, oversight and legal reasons to review the President’s tax returns. We will take all necessary steps, including litigation, if necessary, to obtain them.” Etienne confirmed that the committees are working together to “ensure the House is able to present the strongest possible case.”

    Ways and Means is the only congressional committee with the authority to directly make the request for Trump’s returns. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, whose department has authority over the IRS, will decide whether or not to grant the request.

    Neal had earlier said he might wait for the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia before making the request. The case to draw in multiple committee stakeholders was bolstered after Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee earlier this week, the aides said.

    There are several key pieces of information Cohen, Trump’s former personal “fixer” and attorney, provided in his testimony that strengthen the case for Congress to obtain the returns, according to the aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

    Among other things, Cohen testified that Trump, as head of the sprawling Trump Organization before his election in 2016, had at times deflated the value of his properties to lower his tax bill and called the government “stupid” for giving him a $10 million tax refund in 2008. Under questioning from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Cohen also said Trump had provided inflated assets to an insurance company.

    In a break with modern tradition, Trump has steadfastly refused to disclose his returns, suggesting they are under audit. Every U.S. president dating back to Richard Nixon has voluntarily disclosed his tax returns to the public.

    The U.S. tax code authorizes the Ways and Means Committee to obtain any U.S. taxpayers’ returns. Yet committee lawyers are expected to craft a request as precise as possible, aides said, in order to short circuit an all-but-certain legal challenge by the president that could draw the process out.

    Specifically, the committee is likely to focus on Trump’s personal returns versus his business filings, given the complex nature of the Trump Organization. According to his latest financial disclosure, the Trump Organization includes more than 500 different limited liability companies (LLCs) and shell companies that might take years to obtain and analyze.

    Trump uses LLCs to house and manage his assets, as many wealthy individuals and businesses do, particularly in real estate. Under this arrangement, business income can also “pass through” the LLC to the owner’s individual tax returns.

    The committee believes 10 years of his personal returns “can give a good sense of whether there is any evidence of tax fraud and numerous items of interest,” an aide said.

    Importantly, the aide said the committee also believes it also has the authority to obtain any correspondence between Trump and the IRS, including whether he’s been audited and the results of the audit, that might provide additional information. Cohen, for his part, testified that he didn’t actually think Trump’s tax returns were under audit during the 2016 election, contrary to what Trump has long claimed.

    Democrats will also use Trump’s tax returns to explore whether he sought to write off as a business expense the hush money payments Cohen said he made on behalf of the president to porn star Stormy Daniels.

    At a hearing Neal called last month laying the groundwork to request the president’s taxes, tax expert Steven Rosenthal said Trump had exhibited “aggressive tax planning” prior to his 2016 election and “could have eliminated his taxes for a couple of decades” by claiming millions in business-related losses.

    “There is a lot to find,” said Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who scrutinized portions of Trump’s 1995 and 2005 returns last year in partnership with the New York Times.

    The Times reported in October that the president received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it by skirting U.S. tax laws.

    Source Article from https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-democrats-prepare-effort-request-trump-tax-returns-n978246

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is becoming frustrated with centrist Democrats for casting votes that may suit their individual political considerations, but undermine the interest of the party as a whole. The difficulty she’s running into is complicated by the legacy of Obamacare.

    House Republicans have been wielding what little power they have in the minority to force Democrats to cast difficult votes that split their caucus. On Wednesday, Republicans employed a parliamentary tool known as a ” motion to recommit,” to get centrist Democrats to add an amendment to a gun control bill to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement if an illegal immigrant tries to purchase a gun. That meant the rest of the caucus had to vote for the ICE provision, which they hated, to secure passage of their gun control legislation.

    As my colleague Susan Ferrechio reported, Pelosi has now been telling her caucus to, as a rule, just vote against all Republican motions to recommit. Meanwhile, she is working with other party leaders to come up with a way to limit the ability of the minority party to offer such votes. But even if she succeeds in weakening this particular tactic, it doesn’t change the more fundamental problem facing Pelosi.

    Though Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has become the face of the party, the reality is that she isn’t the one that put Democrats in the majority. That is, Ocasio-Cortez and her young band of socialists, all represent districts that were already held by Democrats. Her district went 78 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and won’t ever be in danger. It was the dozens of Democrats flipping Republican seats in swing districts, some of which voted for President Trump, who gave Democrats their majority.

    It isn’t surprising then that Rep. Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat representing constituents who voted for Trump, supported the ICE amendment, telling the Hill, “I vote my district.”

    So regardless of how Pelosi changes the rules, if Pelosi wants to move legislation supported by the liberal base, she’s going to have to convince centrists to take a plunge. This is where the bad experience of Obamacare comes in.

    In 2009 and 2010, when Pelosi was twisting arms of centrist Democrats to get them to vote for Obamacare, she insisted that it would be a political winner once it passed. When she said, “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy” it was misrepresented as her calling for people to not bother reading the bill until after they voted for it. In reality, she was trying to argue that Obamacare would become popular once it passed.

    We all know how that turned out. In 2010, Democrats lost 63 seats and control of the House. It wouldn’t be until 2018 that Obamacare could be seen as a net vote-getter for Democrats, but before that point, the careers of dozens of centrist Democrats were destroyed because they listened to Pelosi instead of their constituents.

    As Pelosi tries to unite disparate factions within her caucus, the memory of Obamacare will make it a lot more difficult to convince Democrats in swing districts to vote for sweeping liberal legislation.

    Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/how-the-ghost-of-obamacare-is-haunting-nancy-pelosis-speakership

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    Source Article from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-01/washington-governor-inslee-joins-democratic-presidential-field

    • Former Vice President Joe Biden said he believes that President Donald Trump was right to walk away from the second summit with North Korea.
    • “The president did the right thing by walking away,” Biden said while visiting the University of Nebraska at Omaha on Thursday.
    • However, the potential 2020 candidate also slammed the president on his approach to diplomacy.
    • “But diplomacy matters; preparation matters,” he continued. “The president treats everything like it’s a real-estate deal.”

    Former Vice President Joe Biden said that President Donald Trump was right to walk away from the second summit with North Korea. However, the potential 2020 candidate had sharp words for the president’s brand of diplomacy.

    Biden was speaking at the first Chuck Hagel Forum in Global Leadership at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, Nebraska on Thursday. He was in conversation with Hagel, who is not only a former Republican senator, but also served as US secretary of defense during the Obama administration.

    The two former, longtime Senate colleagues discussed the role of US leadership in global affairs.

    RELATED: Donad Trump – Joe Biden feud sparks savage meme




    “American leadership and engagement in the world is essential,” Biden said, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. “If the US fails to lead, who will take our place?”

    Biden also commented on the second US-North Korea summit, which took place this week in Vietnam and broke down on Thursday without an agreement between Trump and Kim Jong Un. The negotiations reportedly broke down over what sanctions would be lifted for what degree of denuclearization. 

    Read more:Trump’s second North Korea meeting ‘clearly is a failure’ as Kim Jong Un walks away with dangerous nuclear arsenal intact

    The former vice president said “hard, hard, hard and consistent diplomacy” was required for tough negotiations, but he gave the president props for walking away from the deal.

    “The president did the right thing by walking away,” Biden reportedly said.

    “But diplomacy matters, preparation matters,” he continued. “The president treats everything like it’s a real-estate deal.”

    He characterized the first summit, where Trump met with Kim in Singapore last year and the two signed a four-point agreement calling for peace on the Korean peninsula and denuclearization of North Korea, as a “great gift” to the North Korean dictator.

    “He was legitimized,” Biden said, according to the Journal Star. “This guy is a thug.”

    Biden is currently contemplating a run for the presidency in 2020, and recently he’s been making stops at universities in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Nebraska. 

    NOW WATCH: The top 15 presidents according to historians

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    SEE ALSO: ‘I will take him at his word’: Trump sides with North Korea and says Kim Jong Un had no idea Otto Warmbier was in ‘horrible’ condition

    Source Article from https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/03/01/biden-praises-trump-for-walking-away-from-n-korea-summit/23681481/

    The mayor of Ciudad Juárez, meanwhile, has threatened to sue a neighboring governor for shipping migrants to his town. It has become a game of political hot potato, with desperate Central Americans who are fleeing poverty and violence caught in the middle.

    Elsewhere along the border, shelter officials say they manage lists of asylum applicants by name, nationality, age and documentation to assist Mexican officials who are complying with American border patrol mandates.

    The Mexican government is resisting Mr. Trump in some ways, the official in Mr. López Obrador’s government insisted. Even acquiescing to the Trump administration on the Migrant Protection Protocols was done strategically, according to the official and two others briefed on the plan.

    By allowing the program to start in San Diego and Tijuana, the Mexican officials argued, legal challenges to it in the United States go to the federal courts in the Northern District of California, which are generally seen as liberal. This matters at a time when many Americans are focused on how to beat Mr. Trump in the 2020 elections, in particular by leveraging the Mexican-American vote.

    But many activists are far from confident that a legal challenge will put an end to the program.

    “I think it’s an incredibly risky move,” said Stephanie Leutert, the director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. “I don’t think you should put your country’s foreign and migratory policy in the hands of a civil society organization in another country.”

    Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/world/americas/mexico-migration-trump.html

    The parents of American college student Otto Warmbier, who died after his detention in North Korea, on Friday countered President Trump’s suggestion that Kim Jong Un was unaware of their son’s treatment – blaming the “evil regime” for Otto’s death and saying no amount of “lavish praise” can change that.

    The president drew bipartisan criticism for saying during Thursday’s summit in Hanoi that he takes Kim “at his word.”

    TRUMP CUTS SUMMIT SHORT

    “I believe something very bad happened to him,” Trump said. “I don’t think leadership knew about it.”

    Fred and Cindy Warmbier released a brief statement on Friday morning reiterating their long-held claim that the regime is responsible for their son’s death:

    “We have been respectful during this summit process.  Now we must speak out. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for the death of our son Otto. Kim and his evil regime are responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”

    White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway clarified in an interview Friday on Fox News, however, that the president agrees with the family and holds North Korea “responsible.” She said Trump was only saying there’s no indication Kim knew what happened at the time.

    “Of course he holds North Korea responsible. He has deep affection and shares the grief of the Warmbier family. That will never end,” she said.

    The 22-year-old University of Virginia student died in June 2017 after being returned home in a vegetative state. His parents have said he was tortured. The suburban Cincinnati youth was visiting North Korea with a tour group when he was detained in 2016 for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. North Korea has denied mistreating Warmbier.

    Trump’s comments on the case drew criticism back home, recalling moments like when he did not challenge Vladimir Putin’s denial of election meddling at their 2018 summit.

    “We shouldn’t be naive about this regime and about the way they mistreat their own people. And certainly the way they mistreated Otto Warmbier,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Thursday.

    There have been conflicting reports over whether Warmbier was tortured. But Trump himself asserted in September 2017 that Warmbier was “tortured beyond belief by North Korea.”

    DETAILS EMERGE ON RACE TO SAVE WARMBIER

    Last summer, Warmbier’s parents praised Trump after he said the first summit with Kim might not have happened if not for Warmbier, and that “Otto did not die in vain.”

    Fox News’ Eric Shawn and Jason Donner and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Source Article from https://www.foxnews.com/politics/warmbiers-parents-push-back-on-trump-comments-blame-kims-evil-regime-for-sons-death